The New Yorker, asked me to contribute my quotes to their article “The Sports Betting Disaster”… here is my longer response about many of the unasked questions of this industry.
The Match-Fixer
The match-fixer was completely at his ease. I thought he was going to be nervous. His gang travels around the world corrupting major sports events, so I thought he may have been slightly apprehensive meeting me, but not at all.
A friend had arranged a roof-top meeting between the three of us. My friend had spent a great deal of time before the meeting in a state of high trepidation. The fixer, on the other hand, when he finally arrived, seemed utterly focused on having a good time. At one point, at my request, he phoned up his Asian boss. It was the middle of the night, and I had not asked him to do that merely pass on my polite respects. But he got his boss out of bed to show us his influence in one of the biggest match-fixing gangs in the world.
In the middle of the long night’s discussion, we asked him what was the biggest challenge to his work. Which specific international agreement has made his life as a match-fixer more difficult? Was it the Macolin Convention? Interpol? The Qatari “sports integrity agency”? The Copenhagen Group of Match-Fixing Experts?
Match-FIxer: Who are they? None of them have had any difference to our work… Look we just keep it simple. No one gets greedy. Keep our profits at 20%, everyone wins and no one notices the fixing.
He is not alone.
The current FBI investigation of the NBA shows that American organized crime has been working since 2019 to build a network that included some of the players and coaches in their league.
Recently, I was speaking to another high-level US sports association about an as-yet non-public gambling scandal. I asked them if this were the proverbial tip-of-the-iceberg. Their words? “Almost every team in our league is facing similar problems.”
As for the anti-doping world of international sports, it is, largely, a deliberately manufactured joke.
For those who do not believe this statement, I have a one word response, “China”.
There is a powerful, carefully orchestrated doping program for some of the top Chinese sports people. It receives de facto protection at the highest levels of the anti-doping world.
The key question is why has this happened? Why has the sporting integrity industry, despite billions of dollars, largely failed?
Not by Accident
The failure of the sports integrity industry is not an accident. A lot of very smart people have spent time, energy and money to ensure that the guarding of sports fails. It is not because there was a particular technology that was overlooked or a specific viewpoint that was neglected, it was a planned attack.
The Rules of Failure
Not everyone in sports integrity is a fraud or a con artist. Much of the industry is full of decent people. Yet, if you had a fishing net company whose product caught so few fish or a meat packing plant who produced so many poisoned sausages, you would ask about the failure.
Occasionally, the very good people of sports integrity have their successes but those victories are mostly constrained to fit the “rules” of the sports world.
I will write more about these rules but note the first of them, is the “Too-Big-to-Fail” Law.
This Law prevents any successful investigation, with long-term consequences, against a star athlete, a powerful nation (doping) or a team from a big market like Paris, London or Los Angeles.
If you are a hard-working sports integrity official you should be very aware of this Law. Break it by trying to investigate the really big scandals, teams or athletes and you will be broken.
The Gold Rush of Data
There is a multi-billion-dollar industry whose vastly profitable companies claim to be guarding the integrity of sports. They say that by monitoring the betting market they can tell when fixes or under-performance is going on.
However, some of those companies are not actually integrity companies but rather data companies. Their boutique, shop-window, disseminate-to-the-media stuff is all about “protecting sports” but where they really collect their money is selling data to the gambling market.
Data is the modern-day gold rush of sports. Live, accurate information on a sports event is an absolute necessity to bookmakers, so they spent gazillions to get hold of it. Because they are the rich clients of this section of the “sports integrity industry,” embarrassing things, like how addictive modern-day gambling is or the fact that athletes are more likely to become gambling addicts gets neglected when they run “education” programs for athletes.
Nasty Nations
When the Colosseum was opened in 80 AD, the Romans and their then-Emperor Titus had a three-month long, blood soaked orgy of celebration. They sent about 3,000 people to their deaths by feeding them to wild beasts or in gladiatorial contests or fake naval battles while the crowd roared.
In our times, a variety of international human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch estimate that to build the infrastructure around the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar somewhere between 6,000 and 15,000 labourers died unnecessary deaths.
To ensure that fewer people than normal paid attention to the fact that thousands of workers died for a modern-day sports event, the Qataris set up their own spook-laden sport integrity agency. Along with attempts to spy on their rivals, they also spent a great deal of money on journalists, academics and “sports integrity experts” who could then discuss almost any sports integrity issue except for the ones that the Qataris did not like to talk about.
The Russians, after their Olympic teams were shown to be largely, criminal doping enterprises did much the same thing at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and that agency’s lop-sided involvement in sports integrity.
Both of these institutions limp along dispensing advice to the sports integrity world. They should be ignored by all civilized adults in the room.
The Sausage Making Plants of Sports Associations
“I have been thinking… the problem is not match-fixing. The problem is that the fans could become aware of the extent of match-fixing and switch off from our sport… then we would lose our sponsors. So the problem is really not investigative, the problem is a media-management.”
It was in the innocent days pre-2010 when the Qataris and their gangs of ex-spooks had not entered the field. The sports executive was, at that point, an almost unknown official in one of the major sports associations. He is, now, one of the most powerful executives in the sports world, but back then, you could say things like the above in private conversations with journalists.
This attitude continues in sports associations around the world. They are, in effect, the owners of the meat packing plant. They do not want to produce a tainted product but if they do, they really do not want anyone to know about it.
Just as we have government paid meat plant inspectors so too does sports need independent investigators.
Have Another Conference!
There is a whole host of intergovernmental agencies purportedly concerned with sports integrity - the Macolin Convention, World Anti-Doping Agencies, Qataris, the Copenhagen Experts, the United Nations of Drug Control, Interpol. These groups host a merry-go-round of conferences. The events are full of well-intentioned but cliche-ridden speeches where po-faced, mostly, non-experts opine upon the challenges of match-fixing, doping and corruption.
Nothing changes. Everyone has a good time. They repeat.
The Occasional Success
There are against the grain successes. One of those is tennis. The sport was deeply embarrassed by a 2016 Buzzfeed/BBC expose of the extent of match-fixing in their world. It was followed up by a superb investigation/court case by the Belgian police, led by the indefatigable Eric Bisschops.
I am not saying that fixing has disappeared from tennis. It is a sport that lends itself to corruption but there are lessons to be learned from the independent agency that guards integrity in tennis.
There are other successes in the sports integrity world - like the Australian sports integrity agency.
We need to have a proper debate. Why has sports integrity failed? And how can we learn from these occasional successes to ensure that we do not keep on with a decades-long track record of losing the battle against the fixers, the dopers and the corrupt officials.
